Yasunao Tone – AI Deviation #1, #2

Hell, this is gnarly. It’s painful. This is not music designed to entertain. It’s not music deigned for comfort. To many ears, it’s not even music. It is, of course, but it’s not music or pleasure. AI Deviation #1, #2 comprises two grinding, cacophonous, chaotic longform tracks which sound like a protracted meltdown of circuitry.

‘Deviation #1’ is a full forty minutes of splintering, spluttering, bleeping, blooping electronic carnage. The whoosh and swirl of the Tardis relocating vaporises into a churning black hole, and by the ten-minute mark, it’s grown to a raging tempest of overloading noise. From thereon in, it’s a brain-melting succession of sonic ruptures. Skittering, spidery notes are scorched away to blackened shards in a flame-torch of white noise blasts. Squelching, squirming subaquatic sounds bubble and broil in a hectic froth of digital swash in between tidal waves of distortion and static.

‘Deviation # 2’ offers more of the same, albeit over a more mercifully brief thirty-three minute stretch. It’s abrasive, disorientating, with time signatures thrown out of the window in favour of warping cacophonies. Resonations and echoes dominate an eternally challenging discord of tweets and tweaks, grumbles and rumbling throbs.

Tone has a knack for clobbering the listener with synth-generated sonic violence, but AIDeviation #1, #2 really takes it up a notch. In exploring the longform – and taking it to the max – Tone produces a sonic attack on a par with Merzbow and Kenji Siratori: anything else is just mannered and polite in contrast.